David Menninger's Analyst Perspectives

MicroStrategy Battles for Top Spot in Analytics and BI

I am happy to offer some insights on MicroStrategy drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides an analytic representation of our assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research Value Index: Analytics and Business Intelligence 2019 is the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We utilized a structured research methodology that includes evaluation categories designed to reflect the breadth of the real-world criteria incorporated in a request for proposal (RFP) and vendor selection process for analytics and business intelligence. We evaluated MicroStrategy and 14 other vendors in seven categories, five relevant to the product (adaptability, capability, manageability, reliability and usability) and two related to the vendor (TCO/ROI and vendor validation). To arrive at the Value Index rating for a given vendor, we weighted each category to reflect its relative importance in an RFP process, with the weightings based on our experience and data derived from our benchmark research on analytics and business intelligence.

MicroStrategy’s product offers one of the most complete sets of capabilities in our Value Index assessment. The product line consists of a number of different modules to deliver all this functionality. In recent years the company has reduced the complexity of installing and using these components and has significantly improved the user interface. The architecture is based on a model of direct access to data in a variety of commercial database products including connectivity to Hadoop.

MicroStrategy ranks second overall in the Value Index, with just a fractional percentage separating it from the first-place finisher. The product ranks first in the Capability and Reliability categories and second in Usability. MicroStrategy scores well in many of the categories we assess and is particularly strong in its architecture, flexibility and scalability. It ranks a close second in Usability based not only on the user interface of its products but also because it provides capabilities designed for various roles including lines of business personnel, analysts, managers, executives and IT personnel.

The company’s lowest rankings are for TCO/ROI and Manageability, where it ranks ninth and seventh respectively. In the latter category, the leaders offer slightly better flexibility across both business and IT administration of the system. Leaders also provide somewhat better tools to establish and document the business value of an investment in their products.

This assessment was based on MicroStrategy 10.11. In January the company released MicroStrategy 2019, which is a platform update. It includes a new feature called HyperIntelligence that enhances integration and collaboration. The release also includes enhancements for analysts, data scientists, developers and administrators.

This research-based index is the most comprehensive assessment of the value of analytics and business intelligence software in the industry. You can learn more about MicroStrategy and others using our Value Index as an effective vendor selection and RFI/RFP tool; read the report here.

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David is responsible for the overall research direction of data, information and analytics technologies at Ventana Research covering major areas including Analytics, Big Data, Business Intelligence and Information Management along with the additional specific research categories including Information Applications, IT Performance Management, Location Intelligence, Operational Intelligence and IoT, and Data Science. David is also responsible for examining the role of cloud computing, collaboration and mobile technologies as they affect these areas. David brings to Ventana Research over twenty-five years of experience, through which he has marketed and brought to market some of the leading edge technologies for helping organizations analyze data to support a range of action-taking and decision-making processes. Prior to joining Ventana Research, David was the Head of Business Development & Strategy at Pivotal a division of EMC, VP of Marketing and Product Management at Vertica Systems, VP of Marketing and Product Management at Oracle, Applix, InforSense and IRI Software. David earned his MS in Business from Bentley University and a BS in Economics from University of Pennsylvania.

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